King of the Wood

by Valerie Anand

  And when a young Angevin lord who had been travelling in Normandy when the news broke arrived in Fulk’s hall and interrupted a busy agenda with the tidings that William was in the monastery of St. Gervais, near Rouen, on his deathbed, Fulk was on suspicious alert at once.

  ‘Dying men have overset their existing wills before now,’ he said to the nobles who were with him, some of them because they were seeking his judgement, others because as his vassals they were obliged to grace his court from time to time. ‘They get people crowded round their beds, all pressing their own claims to this and that. I’m going to St. Gervais.’

  Helias of La Fleche was among those who were in routine attendance. It was he who said: ‘It will make a great difference to the world if William dies. He’s held England and Normandy together. He’s held whole tracts of land quiet and under a single man’s control for years. What will happen when he’s gone? He must have a remarkable personality,’ Helias added, ‘I wish I’d met him.’

  ‘Now’s your chance,’ said Fulk. ‘I’m taking companions, obviously. You can come to St. Gervais with me. You’ll see him, after a fashion. Not that any man’s himself in extremis.' Helias went gladly, interested by the prospect of actually looking on as great a man as the Conqueror, and of being present at the time and place when his world entered on an era of change. He liked the prospect of a journey, too, and the chance to meet new people.

  But the one who was really going to matter to him he did not see face to face.

  In Chenna’s Tun, in Minstead, in Truham, they said, marvelling: ‘The Norman is dead. Only three months since we cursed him, and he’s dead!’

  Old Chenna sneered at them and pointed out how often they’d cursed the Normans before, without result, but they took no notice. They had no doubts. The Horned God of the Wood had shown His power, they said. He had it, when He chose. Here was the proof.

  It gave them a sense of strength. Perhaps it was only a coincidence, and a genuine accident, that one of the Foresters who had taken Young Chenna away was found shortly afterwards lying dead after his horse had apparently thrown him headfirst against a tree.

  But on the other hand, to believe that one has power is to gain courage.

  The soil is fertile and the seeds are planted. They are already growing.

  PART II

  IN WHICH THE SAPLINGS GROW APACE

  1087-1091 AD

  One The Old Order Changes 1087

  Two And the New Order Is Unwelcome 1087

  Three Opening Moves 1087-8

  Four The Sybaritic Duke 1088

  Five The Argumentative Homecoming 1088

  Six Homesickness 1088

  Seven Lightning’s Sudden Strike Feb 1090

  Eight Substitute for a Duke Nov 1090-June 1091

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Old Order Changes 1087

  The custodians of the Royal Treasury at Winchester had never been so outraged. There were things to which they were accustomed and things to which they were most emphatically not, and this intrusive and undignified inquisition into mundane detail on the part of exalted persons who ought to know better unquestionably belonged in the latter category.

  It was perfectly natural that the new King William (who was now called Rufus to his face only by close friends like the Count of Meulan and the bull-like FitzHamon but was still called it behind his back and would be for ever), should wish to establish his right to the Treasury.

  It was perfectly natural that on leaving his father’s deathbed near Rouen, he should make for Winchester even before descending on Canterbury and its Archbishop to demand a coronation. The Treasury keys were the keys of the kingdom and he would have been a fool to do otherwise, since without them no ruler could pay his army or make supporting him in any degree worthwhile.

  And it was entirely reasonable that he should want to know precisely what the Treasury contained. In any case, it was September and they were just getting ready for the Michaelmas audit. But…

  But there was a time-hallowed method of conducting audits. Underlings, humble men but men nonetheless of sound probity, each with an equally trustworthy scribe trotting at his heels, would count everything in the vaulted store rooms under King Edward’s old palace, writing down descriptions and quantities.

  Then senior clerks would match the returns against last year’s, carefully accounting for all incomings and out-goings in between. The finished product, complete with details of debtors and creditors and careful annotations to forestall queries, all exquisitely penned on vellum with section headings in coloured inks, was presented to the Treasury’s three senior officers who would examine it, make a lot of queries which their subordinates had after all failed to forestall and at length, in turn, present the outcome to the Sheriff of Hampshire. Who, having re-quested and got answers to queries of his own, would present them formally to the king.

  It was as clearcut and dignified and in its way as beautiful as a church ritual. And it was nothing whatsoever to do with the Keeper of the Seal, whose province was to ensure the authenticity of documents issued from the royal secretariat; that and nothing else.

  Certainly, no Keeper of the Seal had ever hitherto arrived hotfoot on the second day of the operation, bearing written authority (complete with the current king’s seal) empowering him to oversee the audit personally and shepherd it officiously through all its stages from the very beginning, upwards to the crown.

  Ranulf Flambard had done just that. Furthermore, having got the authority to interfere, he had made it clear that this was no mere theoretical right; he meant to use it.

  Scribes and clerks, their indignation almost strangling them, went about the work while this crass young man, his dark copper tonsure fairly aglow with vitality (‘and the joy of noseyparkering,’ said an angry scribe) and his voice offensively confident, strode about the vaults peering over people’s shoulders and carrying out random recounts of silver coin (‘does he think we’re pocketing it on the side?’ enquired an offended clerk sarcastically). He had bullion ingots heaved off the scales in the middle of weighing, so that he could check the counterweights and at one point brought in a panel of Winchester merchants (‘outsiders!’ exclaimed a horrified. Chief Clerk) to give independent valuations of the jewellery and the costly robes in the hooped oak chests.

  ‘All these items have been valued already and the re-cords are available,’ one official ventured to protest.

  ‘Values change. We want to begin our reign with accurate information on the worth of the Treasury,’ Flambard said.

  ‘Who’s we?’ said the official, under his breath.

  It was plain that Flambard was hugely enjoying himself, that his strong, shapely fingers liked handling precious metals and rich fabrics. It was an additional irritant that his enthusiasm was somehow catching; despite their fury they finished the counting half a day sooner than usual because of it.

  The final insult which he added to the injury he had already done to their self-esteem was that he handled an abacus better than any of them. When all was done and the accounts ready for Rufus, who had just returned, straight from his crowning, to receive them, Flambard retrieved the sheets from the Sheriffs office for ‘a final check’. The Sheriff of Hampshire, annoyed, asked what his own staff were supposed to be for, but: ‘I’ll save them the trouble. It’s a pleasure,’ said Flambard with a maddeningly sunny smile, the one to which the exasperated clerks had more than once unwillingly responded.

  Recalling the stir he had made caused him to smile again as he sat alone, late into the night, validating totals on the abacus. He liked working at night. It was undisturbed; one could concentrate. Flambard needed less sleep than most and his excellent eyesight was not inconvenienced by candlelight. Nor was he nervous. His chamber in the old English palace had three slender glazed windows as well as shutters and he had left the shutters open because he liked a glimpse of starlight, and he did not, as so many people did, think of darkness as something inimical to be held precariously at bay by
the circle of man-made light. There was nothing out there, he had sometimes said when talking to the superstitious or the imaginative, but the ordinary world which in daylight one could see.

  He was astonished at himself, therefore, when as the door of his room opened suddenly and quietly, a bolt of alarm shot through his stomach, bringing him half to his feet with the abacus gripped firmly in his hand.

  Rufus, a square and not notably royal figure, wrapped in a heavy mantle for the purpose of roaming through the cool September night, stepped into the room. He was carrying a lamp. ‘My lord?’ said Ranulf. ‘You startled me.’

  ‘I woke and saw a light. Sit down.’ Flambard did so and the king set the lamp on the table. A loose fold of the mantle showed a patch of barrel chest fuzzed with pale red hair. ‘All my chamberlains were snoring so I came myself to see what you were up to, awake at this hour. Still clicking your beads, eh? Something wrong with the audit?’

  ‘Not that I can see, I’m glad to say. Your Treasury staff are admirably honest and competent. But I like to make sure.’

  ‘Imph. I picked you for efficiency. So did my father.’ Nothing was wrong, surely. Certainly Rufus’ pale round eyes held only approval of this late-night perfectionism. It was strange that the sense of impending menace which had come through the door with him should linger, and so strongly. It was ridiculous, Flambard thought, that he should be wishing that someone else were within easy call. He shook himself, and made the abacus beads rattle. Rufus came to lean over his shoulder and look at the device more closely. ‘I was shown how to use one of these things as a boy, but I can’t remember much about it. Let me see it.’

  A square, reddish hand reached out and flicked at the beads. The king was standing so close that Flambard could feel the heat from his body. ‘My lord, take care. Those wires are fragile.’

  ‘Am I so clumsy?’ Rufus enquired, rhetorically. ‘If I wanted to multiply seven by eight, how would I…?’

  ‘Like this.’ Flambard demonstrated. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, having sensed annoyance in that comment about clumsiness. ‘My wife is careless sometimes and breaks things. She is always having to buy new pots and goblets, which I have to pay for. I’ve got into the habit of warning her when things are delicate. It’s so ingrained now that I warn everyone.’

  ‘Your wife, eh?’ To Flambard’s relief, Rufus seemed to lose interest in the abacus. He moved away to a settle. ‘You’re a priest but you’re married. You’ve no guilt about it – or her?’

  ‘It was usual in my father’s day. I can never see why it can’t be usual now. Why should a man who is called to serve God have to cease from the ordinary business of being a man? I serve the priesthood adequately, I think. I am also a perfectly normal man. I find no clash between them.’

  ‘What if there were a direct clash between your wife and your ambition? Would you put her away?’

  ‘It almost did come to that, once, my lord. No, I should not. I might pretend to do so but no more than that.’

  ‘Humph! I suppose that’s an honest answer. But you are ambitious, aren’t you? Did you know that on his deathbed, my father released my Uncle Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, from prison?’

  Flambard rode the sudden change of subject like a good horseman on a restive mount. ‘Yes, my lord. I had heard.’

  ‘Do you think it was wise?’

  Flambard understood. Taking on the office of king had given a new air of authority to this solid young man. But beneath that forced toughening, Rufus still needed advice and knew it, and he preferred to seek it privately, not in a hall full of older men some of whom might try to take advantage of his inexperience. Whatever else he had had in mind when he came here tonight, a desire for counsel was at least part of it. Advise him well, and there would be reward. The atmosphere of menace had mercifully faded. Flambard knew where he was now. ‘No, my lord, I don’t think it was wise. Bishop Odo was my patron once but I have to say – as I said once before – that his offence was grave. Your father’s act of forgiveness was admirable in its way but wise – no.’

  ‘My father was worked on,’ said Rufus violently, ‘when he was dying and in pain. He was worked on by priests talking about hell and calling on him to repent of his sins. I was there. I threw them out of his room more than once. Worrying him, taking advantage of him. You can’t know what that r… room was like.’

  It was the worst memory he possessed. The weather had been so hot, a bad summer turning suddenly to blistering sun just when it was wanted least. The chamber had been stuffy and it stank with the odours of his father’s body, the nausea and excreta which as time went on grew more and more uncontrollable and offensive. The aromatic herbs the physicians burned to sweeten the air only seemed to thicken it, and the brazier raised the temperature to the tropical. And in the midst of it all, helpless as he had rarely been before, the man who had once been the Conqueror had lain, breathing short against a pain he could not conquer and facing eternity in cold blood instead of on the battlefield where he had always expected to meet it. Had lain facing concepts like God and damnation. Had confronted the knowledge that in the past he had done things which other men spoke of only in whispers, and that he could not now go back and undo them. Had faced the bleak truth that he was afraid.

  And the priests had been in there like carrion crows pouncing on a dead donkey, to exploit the situation.

  ‘My father didn’t make his own will at all,’ Rufus said aggressively. ‘The priests made it for him, backed up by a few obliging barons. I tried to help but he needed someone with the Church’s authority and no one there who had that authority was on his side. The Archbishop of Canterbury was his friend but he was here in England. My father’s old friend Anselm of Bee was ill himself and couldn’t come. So they did as they liked with him. Uncle Odo to be freed, in a kind of payment for past sins, along with a few less important captives. They wanted him to reinstate Odo as Earl of Kent as well but that was one of the times I threw them out. Them and some of the b… barons and counts who kept clustering round him, w… worrying him…’ His stammer had reappeared as it always did when he felt emotional. ‘He n…never had any peace. There were always people round his bedside. You can’t know…’ His voice faded. There was a great deal that Ranulf Flambard could not know, or ever be told, not all of it directly concerned with the Conqueror’s death. When he entered the candlelit chamber, he had realised very quickly that there were certain things against which Ranulf Flambard would instinctively raise defences, would avoid even discussing if he could, by talking about his woman…

  The death-chamber, the day he ordered Fulk of Anjou out. Fulk had gone, tight-mouthed, stamping off down the stone stairs. Rufus, glad to see the back of him, spoke with the doctors and knelt for a few minutes by the bed, anguished as always in this room by a mixture of pity and disgust. It was not disgust with his father but with the dreadful disintegration of his father’s body. He tried, silently, to pray for the Conqueror and it turned into a prayer that nothing like this should ever happen to himself. This shocked him and hearing the noise of hooves and voices below, he rose and went to the window for distraction.

  Below, an angry Fulk was taking his leave, but was holding his horse roughly back because although most of his suite were in their saddles around him, someone appeared to be missing. A groom held a saddled horse and looked anxiously towards the door into the abbey. Fulk cursed, loudly, and demanded to know where that insouciant young devil had got to.

  And then, running from the door and down the steps towards his horse, the insouciant young devil came, light summer cloak flying from his limber shoulders, cheerful voice calling an apology in which there was a considerable amount of laughter and no subservience whatsoever. A young deerhound pranced at his heels. The young man put a hand on his saddle pommel; and was up, as if he had wings.

  In that moment, Rufus’ soul too took flight, straight out of the window towards that blithe young man. He had been taken by surprise, because he had not known that such things could
happen. It had never occurred to him before that one glimpse of a stranger could change the whole world, could impress itself on one’s mind and spirit like a seal upon clay.

  Then the party was gone, jogging and clattering under the archway. He remembered a strong, co-ordinated body, crisp dark hair and the intonation of a voice and nothing more. He did not even know the young man’s name.

  He could have asked. He could have gone down to the courtyard, and said to someone, a groom, the guards at the gate: who was that who came out late and annoyed Fulk of Anjou? But he was afraid that his yearning would show and he could not think of any mundane excuse for the enquiry.

  So he had done nothing, said nothing, let it go. But it had left a mark. Since that first encounter with Rayner, he had been schooling himself to a life in which one gratified desire with one set of people and sought friendship with others. One staggering moment of revelation, standing at his father’s window with death in the room behind him, while he looked out upon the springs of life, and he would never be quite satisfied with that compromise again.

  But the first time he had moved, timidly, towards an attempt to combine the two, Ranulf Flambard had at once spoken of the woman he called his wife. If he wished to keep Ranulf s friendship, he knew he must not repeat the attempt.

  Or allude in any way to that revelation at St. Gervais. He must continue in a political vein. ‘They’ve started on me too, about reinstating Odo in Kent. I don’t know what the outcome will be. I tell you, Flambard, the priests forced my father to forgive Curthose, who’d done nothing for years but rebel. They made Father ratify the arrangement about Maine, and present Curthose with Normandy. But when he sent for C… Curthose he c… couldn’t even hurry himself to g ... get there before Father died. My father didn’t want to do any of it, he said Curthose was too irresponsible, but they made him agree, to buy the goodwill of Heaven.’ Being angry about Curthose and the priests was a way of channelling another kind of feeling, he found. ‘My father hadn’t the strength to resist. So…’ he hurt himself with the next words but did it as if lancing a boil ‘…priests can have wives as far as I’m concerned, Flambard. I’ve seen what the virtuous priests are like!’